Since its arrival by the friendly Amazon express, I've been browsing Charles Taylor's monumental, tantalizing, and repetitive magnum opus: A Secular Age.

Happily, the author states at the outset: "I ask the reader who picks up this book not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a set of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other, and offer a context of relevance for each other."

This makes it possible to excerpt passages or pages, and also potentially misleading, since the whole context does matter. But obtaining some sense of the whole context requires the careful reading of more than 850 pages, including end notes.

On the way to the eschaton, I was struck by this paragraph whose immediate context concerns certain writers of the eighteenth century, but whose contemporary avatars abound.

Unitarianism, like the Arianism which inspired it, can be seen as an attempt to hold on to the central figure of Jesus, while cutting loose from the main soteriological doctrines of historical Christianity. What is important about Jesus is not that he inaugurates a new relation with and among us, restoring or transforming our relation to God. That is not what salvation can mean. What it properly amounts to is our acceding to rational principles of conduct in law and ethics, and our becoming able to act on these. Jesus' role in this is that of a teacher, by precept and example. His importance is as an inspiring trailblazer of what we will later call Enlightenment. For this reason he doesn't need to be divine; indeed, he had better not be, if we want to maintain the notion of a self-contained impersonal order which God in his wisdom has set up, both in nature and for human society. Incarnation would blur the edges of this (p. 291).